Here is a link to the HistoryPin I have been working on: https://www.historypin.org/en/religious-history-of-washington/geo/38.837222,-77.075488,10/bounds/38.512904,-77.391345,39.16007,-76.759631/paging/1
So far I have like 45 pins of various religious buildings scattered throughout the district, with a few just outside. I did my best to systemically include every religion and religious tradition I could find, but I think I could include a few more variations. For example, some more eastern Christian churches are needed beyond just Orthodox Cathedrals.
Besides adding some more buildings and perhaps culling a few superfluous buildings out, the work I have to do is this: edit and augment the commentary/description of each building to explain why the buildings are historically relevant, and add pictures to each building so as to be aesthetically pleasing and visually engaging. If I wanted to do a lot more it would be to add some organization so its more usable, like marking them all by religious tradition or ward in DC or something. I am not worried about completing this in time.
You already have so many pins down, that’s so awesome! The spread in religious traditions you’ve got already seems pretty solid to me, although I guess I’m no expert on that! I think something that was interesting just zooming in on random spots on the map, since it’s got the pins that come along with google maps, was seeing which locations had two pins from a distance—a pin from you and a pin from google maps. I don’t really know how to dig into that off the top of my head, but the seeing the sort of hierarchy placed on these locations as being classified “significant” of “insiginificant” by google versus you simply by that overlap in pins was super cool!
I did also have a small question, partially because I don’t really know much about Historypin, but if there’s a way to color code or otherwise put these pins in subcategories in the first place, are you planning to do that? And if you did, how would you categorize them?
It’s great to see this project coming along! It’s great that you have 44 pins in here and that you have been able to cover so many different religious traditions.
What you have proposed as your focus for the rest of the term makes a lot of sense to me. The historypin interface really needs pictures of sites to work well. So getting an image in their, and ideally having an image for every site, is pretty important for making it feel fully realized. Along with that, editing/augmenting the text for the buildings is a good idea too. Those text blurbs are effectively where you get to communicate a story/narrative, so even if they stay pretty close to names and dates kinds of facts about the buildings there is a chance to shape that text up a bit to fit into a broader story/narrative.
Overall, it’s coming together really well. You’ve got some great coverage of different places and faiths and I think once you round out the pins a bit more you will have something really great. -Trevor